The innate desire to help and understand others lies deeply in our beings.
It is our duty to nurture compassion and to never forget that we are all created as equal, therefore there are not that many differences between all of us.
Read below the best quotes about compassion that I could collect from various online sources. Enjoy your stay!
20 Best Quotes About Compassion For All The Empaths Out There
1. “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.” ― Plato
2. “The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.” ― John Green, Looking for Alaska
3. “More smiling, less worrying. More compassion, less judgment. More blessed, less stressed. More love, less hate.” ― Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart
4. “All I ever wanted was to reach out and touch another human being not just with my hands but with my heart.” ― Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me
5. “We are all different. Don’t judge, understand instead.” ― Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart
6. “For me, I am driven by two main philosophies: know more today about the world than I knew yesterday and lessen the suffering of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you.” ― Neil deGrasse Tyson
7. “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.”
― Mother Teresa
8. “There is no exercise better for the heart than reaching down and lifting people up.”
― John Holmes
9. “Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.” ― Leo Buscaglia
10. “Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive.” ― Dalai Lama XIV, The Art of Happiness
11. “Our task must be to free ourselves… by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and it’s beauty.” ― Albert Einstein
12. “We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer.” ― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison
13. “I find the best way to love someone is not to change them, but instead, help them reveal the greatest version of themselves.” ― Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
14. “A kind gesture can reach a wound that only compassion can heal.” ― Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free
15. “No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.” ― Aesop
16. “While we do our good works let us not forget that the real solution lies in a world in which charity will have become unnecessary.” ― Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah
17. “It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.” ― Albert Camus, Neither Victims Nor Executioners
18. “Until he extends the circle of his compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace.” ― Albert Schweitzer
19. “If a man cannot understand the beauty of life, it is probably because life never understood the beauty in him.” ― Criss Jami, Killosophy
20. “When we give cheerfully and accept gratefully, everyone is blessed.” ― Maya Angelou
30 Quotes About Compassion And Kindness
1. “Courage. Kindness. Friendship. Character. These are the qualities that define us as human beings, and propel us, on occasion, to greatness.” ― R.J. Palacio, Wonder
2. “for there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.” ― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
3. “How would your life be different if…You stopped making negative judgmental assumptions about people you encounter? Let today be the day…You look for the good in everyone you meet and respect their journey.” ― Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free
4. “It is an absolute human certainty that no one can know his own beauty or perceive a sense of his own worth until it has been reflected back to him in the mirror of another loving, caring human being.” ― John Joseph Powell, The Secret of Staying in Love
5. “It only takes a split second to smile and forget, yet to someone that needed it, it can last a lifetime.” ― Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free
6. “It does not matter how long you are spending on the earth, how much money you have gathered or how much attention you have received. It is the amount of positive vibration you have radiated in life that matters,” ― Amit Ray, Meditation: Insights and Inspirations
7. “Highly sensitive people are too often perceived as weaklings or damaged goods. To feel intensely is not a symptom of weakness, it is the trademark of the truly alive and compassionate. It is not the empath who is broken, it is society that has become dysfunctional and emotionally disabled. There is no shame in expressing your authentic feelings. Those who are at times described as being a ‘hot mess’ or having ‘too many issues’ are the very fabric of what keeps the dream alive for a more caring, humane world. Never be ashamed to let your tears shine a light in this world.” ― Anthon St. Maarten
8. “A true gentleman is one that apologizes anyways, even though he has not offended a lady intentionally. He is in a class all of his own because he knows the value of a woman’s heart.” ― Shannon Alder
9. “Your kids require you most of all to love them for who they are, not to spend your whole time trying to correct them.” ― Bill Ayers
10. “Only the development of compassion and understanding for others can bring us the tranquility and happiness we all seek.” ― Dalai Lama XIV
11. “How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation, and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known?” ― Orhan Pamuk, Snow
12. “One man practicing kindness in the wilderness is worth all the temples this world pulls.” ― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
13. “Some people think only intellect counts: knowing how to solve problems, knowing how to get by, knowing how to identify an advantage and seize it. But the functions of intellect are insufficient without courage, love, friendship, compassion, and empathy.”
― Dean Koontz
14. “There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.” ― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
15. “We only have what we give.” ― Isabel Allende
16. “It’s funny how, in this journey of life, even though we may begin at different times and places, our paths cross with others so that we may share our love, compassion, observations, and hope. This is a design of God that I appreciate and cherish.” ― Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
17. “Popular culture is a place where pity is called compassion, flattery is called love, propaganda is called knowledge, tension is called peace, gossip is called news, and auto-tune is called singing.” ― Criss Jami, Killosophy
18. “Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Be kind. Always.”
― Brad Meltzer
19. “The thought manifests the word;
The word manifests the deed;
The deed develops into habit;
And habit hardens into character;
So watch the thought and its ways with care,
And let them spring forth from love
Born out of compassion for all beings.
As the shadow follows the body, as we think, so we become.” ― Dhammapada
20. “There is no small act of kindness.
Every compassionate act makes large the world.” ― Mary Anne Radmacher
21. “There are two types of seeds in the mind: those that create anger, fear, frustration, jealousy, hatred and those that create love, compassion, equanimity and joy. Spirituality is germination and sprouting of the second group and transforming the first group.”
― Amit Ray, Walking the Path of Compassion
22. “Nothing that we despise in other men is inherently absent from ourselves. We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or don’t do, and more in light of what they suffer.” ― Dietrich Bonhoeffer
23. “Can I see anothers woe,
And not be in sorrow too.
Can I see anothers grief,
And not seek for kind relief.
– On Anothers Sorrow” ― William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience
24. “If it is not tempered by compassion, and empathy, reason can lead men and women into a moral void. ” ― Karen Armstrong, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life
25. “Doing nothing for others is the undoing of ourselves.” ― Horace Mann
26. “Let’s invite one another in. Maybe then we can begin to fear less, to make fewer wrong assumptions, to let go of the biases and stereotypes that unnecessarily divide us. Maybe we can better embrace the ways we are the same. It’s not about being perfect. It’s not about where you get yourself in the end. There’s power in allowing yourself to be known and heard, in owning your unique story, in using your authentic voice. And there’s grace in being willing to know and hear others. This, for me, is how we become.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming
27. “Listening is an attitude of the heart, a genuine desire to be with another which both attracts and heals.” ― Sura Hart, Respectful Parents, Respectful Kids: 7 Keys to Turn Family Conflict into Cooperation
28. “When we know ourselves to be connected to all others, acting compassionately is simply the natural thing to do. ” ― Rachel Naomi Remen
29. “Compassion is a lifetime business. You can’t say something like, “I will have compassion on Monday, Thursdays and Fridays only. But for the rest, I will be cruel”. That is hypocrisy.” ― Israelmore Ayivor
30. “The heart that gives, gathers.” ― Tao Te Ching, Tao Te Ching
See also: 150 Betrayal Quotes To Help You Cope And Grow Stronger
20 Loving Quotes About Compassion
1. “One of the most important things you can do on this earth is to let people know they are not alone.” ― Shannon L. Alder
2. “In the end, though, maybe we must all give up trying to pay back the people in this world who sustain our lives. In the end, maybe it’s wiser to surrender before the miraculous scope of human generosity and to just keep saying thank you, forever and sincerely, for as long as we have voices.” ― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything
3. “One of the most spiritual things you can do is embrace your humanity. Connect with those around you today. Say, “I love you”, “I’m sorry”, “I appreciate you”, “I’m proud of you”…whatever you’re feeling. Send random texts, write a cute note, embrace your truth and share it…cause a smile today for someone else…and give plenty of hugs.” ― Steve Maraboli
4. “It is only with true love and compassion that we can begin to mend what is broken in the world. It is these two blessed things that can begin to heal all broken hearts.”
― Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free
5. “Smile at strangers and you just might change a life.” ― Steve Maraboli
6. “Every life deserves a certain amount of dignity, no matter how poor or damaged the shell that carries it.” ― Rick Bragg, All Over But the Shoutin’
7. “Beauty is not who you are on the outside, it is the wisdom and time you gave away to save another struggling soul like you.” ― Shannon L. Alder
8. “When you’re too religious, you tend to point your finger to judge instead of extending your hand to help.” ― Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
9. “It’s a little embarrassing that after 45 years of research & study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other.” ― Aldous Huxley
10. “Give your weakness to one who helps.” ― Rumi
11. “We all are so deeply interconnected; we have no option but to love all. Be kind and do good for any one and that will be reflected. The ripples of the kind heart are the highest blessings of the Universe.” ― Amit Ray, Yoga and Vipassana: An Integrated Life Style
12. “Every single time you help somebody stand up you are helping humanity rise.”
― Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free
13. “I will be generous with my love today. I will sprinkle compliments and uplifting words everywhere I go. I will do this knowing that my words are like seeds and when they fall on fertile soil, a reflection of those seeds will grow into something greater.”
― Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free
14. “Each person you meet
is an aspect of yourself,
clamoring for love.” ― Eric Micha’el Leventhal
15. “There are many goals but one path – the path of compassion.” ― Amit Ray, Nonviolence: The Transforming Power
16. “No one reaches out to you for compassion or empathy so you can teach them how to behave better. They reach out to us because they believe in our capacity to know our darkness well enough to sit in the dark with them.” ― Brené Brown, The Power of Vulnerability: Teachings of Authenticity, Connections and Courage
17. “Love is our most unifying and empowering common spiritual denominator. The more we ignore its potential to bring greater balance and deeper meaning to human existence, the more likely we are to continue to define history as one long inglorious record of man’s inhumanity to man.” ― Aberjhani, Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry
18. “What is hard work? It takes strength, energy, and stress to truly care about others enough to place oneself last, but it is easy to wrap oneself up and selfishly scramble on the heads of others.” ― Criss Jami, Killosophy
19. “It is therefore of supreme importance that we consent to live not for ourselves but for others. When we do this we will be able first of all to face and accept our own limitations. As long as we secretly adore ourselves, our own deficiencies will remain to torture us with an apparent defilement. But if we live for others, we will gradually discover that no expects us to be ‘as gods’. We will see that we are human, like everyone else, that we all have weaknesses and deficiencies, and that these limitations of ours play a most important part in all our lives. It is because of them that we need others and others need us. We are not all weak in the same spots, and so we supplement and complete one another, each one making up in himself for the lack in another.”― Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island
20. “The bank of love is never bankrupt.” ― Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free
20 Self-compassion Quotes On Being Compassionate To Yourself
1. “If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.” ― Dalai Lama XIV, The Art of Happiness
2. “The lotus is the most beautiful flower, whose petals open one by one. But it will only grow in the mud. In order to grow and gain wisdom, first you must have the mud — the obstacles of life and its suffering. … The mud speaks of the common ground that humans share, no matter what our stations in life. … Whether we have it all or we have nothing, we are all faced with the same obstacles: sadness, loss, illness, dying and death. If we are to strive as human beings to gain more wisdom, more kindness and more compassion, we must have the intention to grow as a lotus and open each petal one by one. ” ― Goldie Hawn
3. “Remember, if you ever need a helping hand, it’s at the end of your arm, as you get older, remember you have another hand: The first is to help yourself, the second is to help others.” ― Sam Levenson
4. “Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.” ― Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times
5. “If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.” ― Jack Kornfield, Buddha’s Little Instruction Book
6. “Self-absorption in all its forms kills empathy, let alone compassion. When we focus on ourselves, our world contracts as our problems and preoccupations loom large. But when we focus on others, our world expands. Our own problems drift to the periphery of the mind and so seem smaller, and we increase our capacity for connection – or compassionate action.” ― Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships
7. “It’s important that what thoughts you are feeding into your mind because your thoughts create your belief and experiences. You have positive thoughts and you have negative ones too. Nurture your mind with positive thoughts: kindness, empathy, compassion, peace, love, joy, humility, generosity, etc. The more you feed your mind with positive thoughts, the more you can attract great things into your life.” ― Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart
8. “And when I came in with tears in my eyes, you always knew whether I needed you to hold me or just let me be. I don’t know how you knew, but you did, and you made it easier for me.” ― nicholas sparks, The Notebook
9. “It’s not at all hard to understand a person; it’s only hard to listen without bias.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy
10. “I would rather make mistakes in kindness and compassion than work miracles in unkindness and hardness.” ― Mother Teresa, A Gift for God: Prayers and Meditations
11. “Compassion is the chief law of human existence.” ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky
12. “My husband, Andrius, says that evil will rule until good men or women choose to act. I believe him. This testimony was written to create an absolute record, to speak in a world where our voices have been extinguished. These writing may shock or horrify you, but that is not my intention. It is my greatest hope that the pages in this jar stir your deepest well of human compassion. I hope they prompt you to do something, to tell somone. Only then can we ensure that this kind of evil is never allowed to repeat itself.” ― Ruta Sepetys, Between Shades of Gray
13. “Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question of what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. If one feels that there is nothing ‘we’ can do — but who is that ‘we’? — and nothing ‘they’ can do either — and who are ‘they’ — then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic.” ― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
14. “If everyone in the world sat quietly at the same time, closed their eyes and concentrated as hard as they could on peace and goodwill, all the killing and cruelty in the world would continue. And it will probably increase.” ― George Carlin
15. “True love is born from understanding.” ― The Buddha
16. “Let us not underestimate how hard it is to be compassionate. Compassion is hard because it requires the inner disposition to go with others to place where they are weak, vulnerable, lonely, and broken. But this is not our spontaneous response to suffering. What we desire most is to do away with suffering by fleeing from it or finding a quick cure for it.” ― Henri J.M. Nouwen
17. “Cruel people offer pity when they no longer feel threatened. However, kind people offer compassion and understanding regardless.” ― Shannon L. Alder
18. “It is never too late to turn on the light. Your ability to break an unhealthy habit or turn off an old tape doesn’t depend on how long it has been running; a shift in perspective doesn’t depend on how long you’ve held on to the old view.
When you flip the switch in that attic, it doesn’t matter whether its been dark for ten minutes, ten years or ten decades.
The light still illuminates the room and banishes the murkiness, letting you see the things you couldn’t see before.
Its never too late to take a moment to look.” ― Sharon Salzberg, Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation
19. “Mercy is most empowering, liberating, and transformative when it is directed at the undeserving. The people who haven’t earned it, who haven’t even sought it, are the most meaningful recipients of our compassion.” ― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption
20. “If you want to help her, you need to help yourself first. No one serves their friends by grinding themselves into dust on the altar of compassion.” ― Seanan McGuire, In an Absent Dream
30 Famous Quotes About Compassion
1. “No one has ever become poor by giving.” ― Anne Frank, diary of Anne Frank: the play
2. “One love, one heart, one destiny.” ― Robert Marley
3. “Compassion is the basis of morality.” ― Arthur Schopenhauer
4. “This is my letter to the world
That never wrote to me” ― Emily Dickinson
5. “Men build too many walls and not enough bridges.” ― Joseph Fort Newton
6. “It is easy enough to be friendly to one’s friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.”
― Mahatma Gandhi
7. “The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.” ― Arthur Schopenhauer, The Basis of Morality
8. “As long as Man continues to be the ruthless destroyer of lower living beings, he will never know health or peace. For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love.” ― Pythagoras
9. “That’s what I consider true generosity: You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing.” ― Simone de Beauvoir
10. “You have not lived today until you have done something for someone who can never repay you.” ― John Bunyan
11. “The only time you look in your neighbor’s bowl is to make sure that they have enough. You don’t look in your neighbor’s bowl to see if you have as much as them.”
― Louis C.K.
12. “I don’t want to live in the kind of world where we don’t look out for each other. Not just the people that are close to us, but anybody who needs a helping hand. I cant change the way anybody else thinks, or what they choose to do, but I can do my bit.”― Charles de Lint
13. “تبسمك في وجه أخيك صدقة، وأمرك بالمعروف صدقه ونهيك عن المنكر صدقة، وإرشادك الرجل في أرض الضلال لك صدقة، وبصرك الرجل الرديء البصر لك صدقة، وإماطتك الحجر والشوك والعظم عن الطريق لك صدقة
Smiling in your brother’s face is an act of charity.
So is enjoining good and forbidding evil,
giving directions to the lost traveler,
aiding the blind and
removing obstacles from the path. ― (Graded authentic by Ibn Hajar and al-Albani: Hidaayat-ur-Ruwaah, 2/293)”
14. “Love is not patronizing and charity isn’t about pity, it is about love. Charity and love are the same — with charity you give love, so don’t just give money but reach out your hand instead.” ― Mother Teresa
15. “The simplest acts of kindness are by far more powerful then a thousand heads bowing in prayer.” ― Mahatma Gandhi
16. “If a person seems wicked, do not cast him away. Awaken him with your words, elevate him with your deeds, repay his injury with your kindness. Do not cast him away; cast away his wickedness.” ― Lao-Tzu
17. “Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen
18. “True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.” ― Martin Luther King Jr.
19. “On the one hand maybe I’ve remained infantile, while on the other I matured quickly, because at a young age I was very aware of suffering and fear.” ― Audrey Hepburn
20. “A truly compassionate attitude toward others does not change even if they behave negatively or hurt you.” ― Dalai Lama XIV
21. “Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who’d be kind to me. That’s what people really want, if they’re telling the truth.” ― Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
22. “Half of what I say is meaningless; but I say it so that the other half may reach you.”
― Khalil Gibran, Sand and Foam
23. “We must fight against the spirit of unconscious cruelty with which we treat the animals. Animals suffer as much as we do. True humanity does not allow us to impose such sufferings on them. It is our duty to make the whole world recognize it. Until we extend our circle of compassion to all living things, humanity will not find peace.”
― Albert Schweitzer
24. “Compassion is the sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else’s skin. It’s the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too. ” ― Frederick Buechner
25. “Give, but give until it hurts.” ― Mother Teresa
26. “I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth; I am a citizen of the world.”
― Eugene Debs, Writings of Eugene V. Debs
27. “These things will destroy the human race: politics without principle, progress without compassion, wealth without work, learning without silence, religion without fearlessness, and worship without awareness.” ― Anthony de Mello
28. “There is strange comfort in knowing that no matter what happens today, the Sun will rise again tomorrow.” ― Aaron Lauritsen, 100 Days Drive: The Great North American Road Trip
29. “If you have men who will exclude any of God’s creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.”
― Francis Of Assisi
30. “Compassion is a verb.” ― Thich Nhat Hanh
See also: 200 Greatest Life Lessons Quotes To Live Your Best Life
30 Quotes About Compassion You Need To Think About
1. “When good people consider you the bad guy, you develop a heart to help the bad ones. You actually understand them.” ― Criss Jami, Killosophy
2. “A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” ― Albert Einstein
3. “Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.” ― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
4. “Compassion hurts. When you feel connected to everything, you also feel responsible for everything. And you cannot turn away. Your destiny is bound with the destinies of others. You must either learn to carry the Universe or be crushed by it. You must grow strong enough to love the world, yet empty enough to sit down at the same table with its worst horrors.” ― Andrew Boyd, Daily Afflictions: The Agony of Being Connected to Everything in the Universe
5. “I have no idea what’s awaiting me, or what will happen when this all ends. For the moment I know this: there are sick people and they need curing.” ― Albert Camus, The Plague
6. “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.” ― Dom Helder Camara, Dom Helder Camara: Essential Writings
7. “Rage — whether in reaction to social injustice, or to our leaders’ insanity, or to those who threaten or harm us — is a powerful energy that, with diligent practice, can be transformed into fierce compassion.” ― Bonnie Myotai Treace
8. “No one truly knows what they will do in a certain situation until they are actually in it. It’s very easy to judge someone else’s actions by what you assume your own would be, if you were in their shoes. But we only know what we THINK we would do, not what we WOULD do.” ― Ashly Lorenzana
9. “Good works is giving to the poor and the helpless, but divine works is showing them their worth to the One who matters.” ― Criss Jami, Killosophy
10. “Beautify your inner dialogue. Beautify your inner world with love light and compassion. Life will be beautiful.” ― Amit Ray, Nonviolence: The Transforming Power
11. “Spirituality is recognizing and celebrating that we are all inextricably connected to each other by a power greater than all of us, and that our connection to that power and to one another is grounded in love and compassion. Practicing spirituality brings a sense of perspective, meaning and purpose to our lives.” ― Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection
12. “We habitually erect a barrier called blame that keeps us from communicating genuinely with others, and we fortify it with our concepts of who’s right and who’s wrong. We do that with the people who are closest to us and we do it with political systems, with all kinds of things that we don’t like about our associates or our society. It is a very common, ancient, well-perfected device for trying to feel better. Blame others….Blaming is a way to protect your heart, trying to protect what is soft and open and tender in yourself. Rather than own that pain, we scramble to find some comfortable ground.”
― Pema Chodron
13. “I believe the world is divided in three groups: givers, takers and the few that can balance both impulses. Giving and loving is a beautiful thing. It is the currency of compassion and kindness, it is what separates good people from the rest. And without it, the world would be a bleak place. If you are a giver, it is wise to define your boundaries because takers will take what you allow them to; all givers must learn to protect that about themselves or eventually, there is nothing left to give.” ― Tiffany Madison
14. “The faculty to think objectively is reason; the emotional attitude behind reason is that of humility. To be objective, to use one’s reason, is possible only if one has achieved an attitude of humility, if one has emerged from the dreams of omniscience and omnipotence which one has as a child. Love, being dependent on the relative absence of narcissism, requires the developement of humility, objectivity and reason. I must try to see the difference between my picture of a person and his behavior, as it is narcissistically distorted, and the person’s reality as it exists regardless of my interests, needs and fears.”
― Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
15. “When morality comes up against profit, it is seldom that profit loses.” ― Shirley Chisholm
16. “Protect your enthusiasm from the negativity and fear of others. Never decide to do nothing just because you can only do little. Do what you can. You would be surprised at what “little” acts have done for our world.” ― Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
17. “The beauty and mystery of this world only emerges through affection, attention, interest and compassion . . . open your eyes wide and actually see this world by attending to its colors, details and irony.” ― Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red
18. “Hurt people hurt people. We are not being judgmental by separating ourselves from such people. But we should do so with compassion. Compassion is defined as a “keen awareness of the suffering of another coupled with a desire to see it relieved.” People hurt others as a result of their own inner strife and pain. Avoid the reactive response of believeing they are bad; they already think so and are acting that way. They aren’t bad; they are damaged and they deserve compassion. Note that compassion is an internal process, an understanding of the painful and troubled road trod by another. It is not trying to change or fix that person.” ― Will Bowen, Complaint Free Relationships: How to Positively Transform Your Personal, Work, and Love Relationships
19. “Many people are like garbage trucks. They run around full of garbage, full of frustration, full of anger, and full of disappointment. As their garbage piles up, they look for a place to dump it. And if you let them, they’ll dump it on you. So when someone wants to dump on you, don’t take it personally. Just smile, wave, wish them well, and move on. Believe me. You’ll be happier.” ― David J. Pollay, The Law of the Garbage Truck: How to Respond to People Who Dump on You, and How to Stop Dumping on Others
20. “Compassion is the signature of Higher Consciousness. Non-violence is the tool to evolve into the Higher Consciousness.” ― Amit Ray, Nonviolence: The Transforming Power
21. “Compassion is the radicalism of our time.” ― Dalai Lama XIV
22. “How beautiful would it be if we could just see souls instead of bodies? To see love and compassion instead of curves.” ― Karen Quan, Write like no one is reading 2
23. “Biblical orthodoxy without compassion is surely the ugliest thing in the world.”
― Francis Schaeffer
24. “When two humans have lived together for many years it usually happens that each has tones of voice and expressions of face which are almost unendurably irritating to the other. Work on that. Bring fully into the consciousness of your patient that particular lift of his mother’s eyebrows which he learned to dislike in the nursery, and let him think how much he dislikes it. Let him assume that she knows how annoying it is and does it to annoy – if you know your job he will not notice the immense improbability of the assumption. And, of course, never let him suspect that he has tones and looks which similarly annoy her. As he cannot see or hear himself, this easily managed.” ― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
25. “We do not need guns and bombs to bring peace, we need love and compassion.”
― Mother Teresa, The Joy in Loving: A Guide to Daily Living
26. “Sometimes, you will go through awful trials in your life and then a miracle happens–God heals you. Don’t be disheartened when the people you love don’t see things like you do. There will be Pharisees in your life that will laugh it off, deny that it happened, or will mock your experience based on righteousness they think you don’t possess. God won’t deny you a spiritual experience because you are not a spiritual leader. He loves everyone equal. The only people that really matter in life are the people that can “see” your heart and rejoice with you.” ― Shannon L. Alder
27. “No daylight to separate us.
Only kinship. Inching ourselves closer to creating a community of kinship such that God might recognize it. Soon we imagine, with God, this circle of compassion. Then we imagine no one standing outside of that circle, moving ourselves closer to the margins so that the margins themselves will be erased. We stand there with those whose dignity has been denied. We locate ourselves with the poor and the powerless and the voiceless. At the edges, we join the easily despised and the readily left out. We stand with the demonized so that the demonizing will stop. We situate ourselves right next to the disposable so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away.” ― Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion
28. “We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization – black people amongst blacks, and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion and love…. What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.” ― Robert F. Kennedy
29. “I made the choice to be vegan because I will not eat (or wear, or use) anything that could have an emotional response to its death or captivity. I can well imagine what that must feel like for our non-human friends – the fear, the terror, the pain – and I will not cause such suffering to a fellow living being.” ― Rai Aren
30. “The funny thing about the heart is a soft heart is a strong heart, and a hard heart is a weak heart.” ― Criss Jami, Healology
Final Word
I hope that you have found these quotes about compassion as inspiring as I did. There really is something gracious and important about being compassionate towards each other, that will never go out of style.
As one of the quotes said, you never know what battles someone is fighting, or what an individual is going through; therefore being nice is the least we could do for someone.
Read next: 130 Islamic Quotes That Will Soothe Your Soul
